


To Paint With Ink

by slaughtermom



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Other, mercykill - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-08 13:40:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7759936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slaughtermom/pseuds/slaughtermom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book.<br/>It’s written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.”<br/>― Burial Rites</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

The sound came before the impact. A boom of noise, reverberating in ears and rattling brain. The pain came next. White hot heat blooming up her shoulder as the pieces of angelic silhouette shattered. Clipped metal, a bird with one wing Angela tried desperately to halt her pin wheeling descent into the reflective glass of an office building. 

Red on white. Glittering pieces of her crash landing sprinkled in hair and imbedded in scalp lent to a blooming headache behind blue eyes. Gloved hands pressed to a floor gone thick with ichor. A shove to her knees. A failed push to her feet as thick viscous smoke froze limbs and metamorphosed the hard press of muzzle under chin. 

“Are you going to tell me Doc?” The voice behind porcelain mask rasped. “Tell me what you did! Tell me why you played god with a corpse!”  

“I…” Angela swallowed hard. There was calm here. There had to be or she was dead. A hit as this range, at that point on her body. No nanos would save her. “I’m sorry Gabriel.”     

A cock of barrel. A harder press of cold final death. She was going to die here. She was going to die and nothing was – 

“ Fix this. ” 

The good doctor’s mouth would have fallen open if not for the pressure of the shotgun. She’d expected death. She deserved death for what she did to him, forcing a twilight existence. Forcing that cold corpse so far past the six minute threshold of revival back to life. 

I can’t. She wanted to say. I’m scared to try. She needed to add. 

“Gabriel I…”

Rat-tat-tat-tat

Tracer’s quick quip of cavalry and the flashing blue of chrono accelerator brightened a room dark with smoke. Puddles of inky black swirled as the corporal turned ghost and seeped out the broken window. Angela’s teeth chattered. Relief, shock, a chill to her bones that refused to leave. How close to death had she come? How ready she was to pay for her crimes against him? 

-

“I don’t know love.” Lena said, not for the first time as she fast walked through the control center turned scientist office for Winston. “She’s not left the medbay since the mission. Not even to get gelato. Who turns that down?” 

Winston, well versed in the former pilot’s antics, peered at Lena over square spectacles. He’d gotten the report, feared the worse when the helicopter touched down in Gibraltar. Worried even more when the good doctor scarce said a word before locking herself away. 

“Athena runs scans on everyone. If something was wrong, we’d know about it.” 

“But she’s…”

“Give her time Lena. Reaper or whatever he’s calling himself now isn’t a fight you shrug off.” 

-

There’d been a whisper of ichor in her suit. Black tar seeped into the crevices, leaked out from Lena’s bullets and burrowed into metal. Angela held it under the microscope watching in abated breath for the oddity to reform as it had over the course of the last two days. 

Decay, broken bonds and absolute malfunction followed by rapid healing to a nearly healthy product. Then decay again. Then healing. Then. Then. It simply didn’t make sense. The substance was slowly consuming itself as it went through cycles but with anything organic… eternal half-life. A ruined form that would last forever. 

Hands smelling of antiseptic rubbed over tired features. The good doctor had attempted to add the newer developed nanobytes into the mass, only to have them consumed by the old with no change to composition. She’d starved the bit of Reyes, the bit of grim reaper to see if it would indeed expire only to have smear under glass threaten to break it in escape. 

What had she done? What could she do to fix this, to fix him when she didn’t even understand how it had happened in the first place. Experimental nanos, research lost in the fire of Blackwatch’s rebellion. 

A mistake. Angela knew it had been a mistake to attempt revival when she found him. Reyes was dead. Body splayed akimbo with limbs twisted to impossible angles. Rigor mortis already setting in and forming those purple splotches everywhere gravity deemed. She’d had the bits of nanos salvaged from her now blown lab. An extra staff, depleted completely by the crack running the length of it. 

The good doctor had panicked. Pure and simple adrenaline lined panic as she fumbled through refilling the broken scepter. They’d puddled on the ground, escaped despite her tight grip and still Angela had spoken the words. Still she’d fed instructions through her haloed neuron receptor. 

And the world had gone black. No, no that wasn’t accurate. Reyes had turned black. Sticky ichor smelling of rot as his body seeped into the floor and disappeared from sight. He’d gone from dead to a stain on concrete and she’d… she’d not spoken a word of what happened. Ashamed of her actions, ashamed of the failure of them and desecration done to his body.

And now. 

“Dr. Ziegler to report to hangar bay. Mission details incoming.” 

Blue eyes focused on the source of the announcement. Athena’s blinking logo above the reams of data flashing on her comp. A rescue mission? UN operatives (dangerous ones with their denouncement of Overwatch and following of the Petras Act) trapped in a surge of uprising of fighting between Omnics and the people wanting to dismantle every bit of AI online. 

“Athena report to Winston. ETA to leaving thirty minutes.” 

“Acknowledged Dr. Ziegler.” 

_

A trap. They’d known it as soon as the shuttle set down and destruction boiled like a storm on the horizon. Separated from the team, out of breath and limping as her suit scrambled to knit flesh riddled with shrapnel Angela leaned against an aging wall. A brick thing, a throwback to the brownstones of the last century. Sturdy enough to absorb bullets though a dire straight should they bring out heavier arsenal. 

“Winston. Tracer. McCree come in. I’m pinned down and need extraction.” Static crackled back, any words lost in the garbling of whatever machine they had used to break through communications. Angela thumped her head back against the wall, eyes on the bits of sky visible between brick and mortar. She needed a miracle, one preferably with a big shield to get her out of here.

The black swirl around her feet was freezing. It sapped strength and forced the leaning doctor into a crouch as Reaper formed above her. White light behind skull mask took in her form. A clawed hand pressing on wounded thigh, drawing forth a gasp of pain and raised blaster between them. 

“Get back.” She snarled weakly. A lion’s roar muffled into kitten’s mew. “Stay away from me.” 

A lark to think she’d shoot him. Guilt heavy and survival heavier, the noise of a shot – even in the midst of war waging – was sure to bring more enemies to her. Angela refused to die in a dirty alley on a setup mission. 

The hand moved, sliding cold fingers up her thigh to the pack at waist and drawing out sheer glass with its smear of black held betwixt. If Angela could see his face, she was sure a brow would be raised. Weight had to be carefully regulated in missions. Too much and you were slowed. Too little and you chanced not having the supplies needed in worst case scenarios. In scenarios like this. 

A small shatter of crystalline in hand, the black ichor sliding from palm to the rest of him that surrounded her. Glass on palm. Palm on chin the specter held back the death he stole from so many as he considered silently.          

Her blaster stayed raised. The tip pressing into the smoked outline. Was it a standoff? Was that what stayed – 

                            “Go East. The monkey has a shield down three buildings away. Third floor.” 

“What?” 

                            “Get out of here.” 

As silent as he came, the coldness left and with it everything but phantom pain her leg and drips of red on a soft jaw from death’s hand. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is   
> just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”  
>                                        ―  Knockemstiff

The problem with growing flesh in a lab was time. It took months to petri-dish even a handful of usable cells. Coupled with the cost of equipment that would have to be “borrowed” from whatever lab currently held the cutting edge of technology and the clandestine nature of her experiments, it was simply easier to smuggle in a half dozen hogs than billion dollar machinery that took months to give any sort of progress.

Simplified her testing was a two-step process. The pig had to be slaughtered and decomposed to the exact amount Reyes had been. Rigor mortis and blood splotches congealing under skin where gravity settled them. The nanos or as close as she could get to the experimental miniature machines added and a raising of the corpse into the half living specter – this one without guns and a vendetta against her to further test on. Unethical. Perhaps, but only one short step down the already fallen rabbit hole of vigilante groups and grim patients.

Hair pulled back into a tight pony tail and mask firmly in place to muffle the smell of her living experiments, Angela set to work mimicking the failed nanos she’d used six years ago. Micro-goggles in place it was a bug like visage that looked up to the knock on the closed door of her laboratory. Intercom squawked alive as the resident scientist asked permission for entry.

Winston’s cup, water instead of the strong black coffee in her own, sat untouched as they considered each other across the spanse of table. He was getting older, the gorilla with the mind of a scientist. Angela wondered if he ever thought of experiments that went into making his mind so advanced. The unethical animal testing. The horror that came from whatever objectivity his mentor/creator/father had used to justify his actions.    

Was she any better? Pigs weren’t unfeeling animals. Close in DNA to humans, only surpassed by chimps and apes, Angela was killing them. Reviving them. Making monsters of farm animals in the pursuit of answers to questions that would have never been raised if not for her arrogance on that fateful day a half decade ago.

“So pigs?” Winston’s voice broke through the internal conflict of her mind. “Assuming you’re not going into farming.”

“Experiments” She replied simply, ignoring the grunts and squeals as well as the smell from penned part of the lab.

Furred digits drummed on porcelain. Glasses mimicking the ones he came to earth with (the originals gone many times over in missions since) giving a soulful countenance to primate features.

“I know Angela. I had the same thought when the Intel came in it was Reyes. No doctor of course, but a scientist finds a way. He would kill everything we’re trying to rebuild and that smoke… whatever he is, isn’t something tesla power or bullets can kill.”

Bitterness on tongue. Blackened brewed beans holding their tart in her sip of scalding drink. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Not that he was wrong about her reasoning… or rather not completely right. She didn’t want to kill Gabriel unless she had to. She just wanted – she needed this mistake of the past fixed. The blight of it gone from her good works.

“I’m asking you as a friend to consider what you’re doing. You know what it’ll take for trials to have consistent data. You’re not someone who sacrifices lives like that. There’s no greater good to be had in following Talon’s footsteps.”

“Talon?” Did he think? Of course he did.

“I’ll consider your words mein freund.” Angela curved her lips in the politeness expected of her. It didn’t do make him worry.

The email came the next morning. Athena’s dry modulated voice telling the scientist snoozing in his swing that it was urgent and from Dr. Ziegler. Barely a blurry line into it, Winston’s reading was interrupted by the yell of an American cowboy and rapid dash of feet.

“Good god almighty there’s enough hogs in hallway to make a Texan blush.”

 

_Winston,_

_Taking your advice and dropping my current_   
_pursuit of replicating Reyes’ condition. Taking_   
_leave of Gibraltar immediately. Please take care_   
_of the lab and specimens while I’m away._

_Angela_

 

  
The air was cold. Blustering winds, frigid on every piece of exposed skin. She hardly noticed, so intent on trekking the parameter of what would be her home for… for until she fixed what she’d broken. The mountains of Montana were hardly what one thought of when they thought of Overwatch safe houses or what had been safe houses before they were shut down.

She supposed Gabriel could be thanked for the undisturbed nature of the place. Frightfully paranoid at information getting into Talon’s hands – he’d kept the location of the cabin off any paperwork. Jack had agreed, reluctantly agreed to the secrecy.

Hands pressed to the panel cleverly hidden as a welcome home sign. Nothing. Nothing. Finally a pale green light emitted and the monotone voice of tethered AI spoke from hidden speakers.

                                                **“Welcome Dr. Ziegler.”**


End file.
